“Just put an empty else there” – Said to me my, older, more experienced, colleague.
”Why, what good would that do?!” - I asked.
-”Just do it!”
I did what he said, and lo and behold, the performance of algorithm that we tried to optimize changed.…

Let’s examine code (in C++) below:

Take a look at the code below. It’s pretty basic, so even if you don’t know C, you should be able to understand it.